Expeditions, happiness and luxury
I stumbled across a fantastic article on Charles Leadbeater's site today. I heard Charles ('one of the world's leading authorities on innovation and creativity in organisations') give a fantastic talk at last year's TED Global conference, and we shared the stage at a recent event for IDEO in London, where the theme was 'happiness'.
Whereas I managed to sidestep answering the question of what actually makes us happy by telling a few stories about frostbite, polar bears and flying around in rickety Russian helicopters, Charles had clearly gone to the trouble of thinking seriously about his response, and he gave a thought-provoking talk.
I suppose we are truly happy – or at least we have the possiblity of being truly happy – when these two strands come together: we escape into commitment. Voluntary commitment becomes the true mark of happiness, when we feel we belong and when we choose to invest ourselves in things.
Expeditions, to me, embody this idea of 'escaping into commitment' absolutely. Being dropped by helicopter at the start of my 2004 North Pole trip represented, on the one hand, utter escape. I was alone in no man's land, thousands of miles from the fetters of civilised society. Yet I was also entering a period of complete commitment; the amount of thought and energy that goes into merely staying alive in those conditions is remarkable. To do so while also walking 1,000km took (perhaps understandably) more focus than I'd ever given anything before.
Charles' article on luxury (pdf) had me nodding in agreement as well:
Luxury experiences come in all shapes and sizes these days. Cheap technology means the average person can walk down a road listening to better quality music than a King could have summoned up a century ago… In every city in the world luxury brands – Gucci and Prada, Armani and Mont Blanc – sell the same products. Anything you can buy in an airport is not a luxury. That means luxury will come from finding oddity, idiosyncrasy, something that has not been discovered by others, and does not have a brand upon it… In a more cacophonous, relentlessly always on world, people will look for sanctuary: pockets of calm and breathing spaces where they can be themselves.
Breathing spaces don't come much bigger than the Arctic Ocean, the Greenland icecap or the Antarctic plateau, yet before today I'd never really thought of expeditions as luxuries. From tough guy to epicure in the blink of an eye…
— Filed under Rumination